They played for the sake of play alone, and their only concern was the ultimate evolution of their game.

Thursday, June 01, 2006

Exhaustion

Because someone was right when they said to me today 'your people can bring you a lot of good times -- but right now it seems that each one has something new that they want from you. One at a time wouldn't be so bad. But all at once? Please.':

"I was pouring out on him everything that was in my heart, cries of anger, cries of joy. He seemed so certain about everything, didn't he? And yet none of his certainties was worth one hair on a woman's head. He wasn't even sure he was alive, because he was living like a dead man. Whereas it looked as if I was the one who'd come up emptyhanded. But I was sure about me, about everything, surer than he could ever be, sure of my life and sure of the death I had waiting for me. Yes, that was all I had. But at least I had as much of a hold on it as it had on me. I had been right. I was still right. I was always right. I had lived my life one way and I could just as well have lived it another. I had done this and I hadn't done that. I hadn't done this thing, but I had done another. And so? It was as if I had waited all this time for this moment and for the first light of this dawn to be vindicated. Nothing, nothing mattered, and I knew why. So did he.

Throughout the whole absurd life I'd lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future, across years that were still to come, and as it passed, this wind leveled whatever was offered to me at the time, in years no more real than the ones I was living. What did other people's deaths or a mother's love matter to me; what did his God or the lives people choose or the fate the think they elect matter to me when we're all elected by the same fate, me and billions of privileged people like him who call themselves my brothers? Couldn't he see, couldn't he see that? Everybody was privileged. There were only privileged people. The others would all be condemned one day. And he would be condemned, too. What would it matter if he were accused of murder and then executed because he didn't cry at his mother's funeral? Salamano's dog was worth just as much as his wife. The little robot woman was just as guilty as the Parisian woman Masson married, or as Marie, who had wanted me to marry her. What did it matter that Raymond was as much my friend as Celeste, who was worth a lot more than him?...

... It was as if that blind rage has washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, I that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself - so like a brother, really - I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate."

"I am the seasoned traveler
Of the Labyrinth.
The genius of alacrity,
Wizard of the impossible.
My brilliance is yet unmatched
In its originality.
My heart's filled with potent magic
That could cast a hundred spells.
I am put together
For mine own pleasure.

I am the Monkey."

Seems pretty apt.

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"My friend, every sorceress is a pragmatist at heart; nobody sees essence who can't face limitation. If I wanted only to hold you

I could hold you prisoner." -- Circe's Power, Louise Gluck

"My story is not a pleasant one; it is neither sweet nor harmonious, as invented stories are; it has the taste of nonsense and chaos, of madness and dreams -- like the lives of all men who stop deceiving themselves." -- Demian, Hermann Hesse

"The Muses are vindictive deities: they avenge themselves without mercy on those who weary of their charms." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

THE RULES: As a general rule, and most of you already know this, I prefer annonymous comments on this blog. Here is where I like to talk more "idea to idea" than person to person. I've got another journal wherein I get all personally chatty, but here I like the idea of ideas being separate from the contructs/biases/"personalities" behind them. Because those things color us all, don't they? Anyway, it's not a hard and fast rule, so feel free to comment however you like. Caro can never help giving herself away and, of course, Aspyre is always welcome to comment with identity because when Ladarna and Aspyre talk, it has always been idea to idea anyway. :)